Sugar-Free Almond Roca Crunch Ice Cream

My mother brought to our family Christmas dinner at my aunt’s house, a lovely little platter of almond-roca-style toffee — made with no refined sugar whatsoever. It was delicious!

She also made the glass dish on which it was served. Not that she wanted to brag about it via my writing, or anything.

Well, when we got back to our house to have our gift exchange, my mom was delighted to discover what Santa brought her:

And then, the idea was born — almond roca ice cream!

My mom lives in Washington state where real (raw) milk is legal even at the retail sale level. (You can see where your state stands with raw milk laws over at the Farm-To-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.) So, she headed over to her local health food store to pick up a couple pints of this gloriously healthy cream from happy, grass-fed Jersey cows:

What I wouldn’t give to have that kind of luxury! My mom whipped up another batch of almond roca and added it to a simple, wholesome vanilla ice cream. Here’s her recipes!

Sugar-Free* Almond Roca Toffee

Ingredients:

1/2 cup real, raw honey (I guess since we’ll be cooking it, you wouldn’t necessarily have to buy raw, but at least get a decent, non-super-processed honey)

Combine butter, honey and salt in a saucepan and heat on medium-low until it reaches a hard crack stage. My mom actually didn’t even use a candy thermometer — she just eyeballed it and did the water drop test. (Take a drop of the toffee and drop it into cold water — if it feels like brittle toffee, you’re good!) Stir in the vanilla, then the almonds and cook slightly longer (30 seconds or so). Then, spread toffee onto a buttered baking sheet to about a 1/3 inch thickness and refrigerate until well chilled. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler and spread onto the toffee. If you’d like, you can reserve some of the almonds to finely chop and sprinkle onto the chocolate topping.

*Oh. I just realized something. I guess depending on the brand of chocolate you buy, it may have a negligible amount of sugar sugar. And I get that honey has fructose and glucose — two types of sugar — in it naturally, but what I mean by “sugar-free” is that you’re not dumping a bunch of white C&H or corn syrup into this. Which you normally would with making any type of candy. So this is about as good as you’re gonna get!

To make Almond Roca Crunch Ice Cream:

Crumble the almond roca into chocolate-chip-sized pieces, and add into your vanilla ice cream as it’s churning in the machine. And then put some more on top of it once it’s in the bowl. Or a lot. A really disproportionate amount, like I did.

How amazing does that look?! I’d take this over Heath bar Breyer’s ice cream any day!

What’s your favorite homemade ice cream recipe? If you try out this one, be sure to let me know. Mama Butter will be so very pleased!

I just made this today. It’s so good!! I was just telling my mother-in-law a few days ago that I need to find a recipe to make my own toffee after she had just brought a bunch for the rest of the family. I just made a couple of changes to your recipes to make them work for GAPS. So yummy! Plus, it was a great excuse to use my new electric ice cream maker (no more hand cranking!). Thanks for sharing!

Just an observation. Twin Brooks Creamery products are not raw, but are non-homogenized and low-heat pasteurized, which is about as close to raw milk as most people have access too. We ARE lucky in WA to have legal sales of raw milk, but it is not widely available through retail sources.

On the other note I wanted to make, I am super excited to make this toffee for my dad, who has recently made major dietary changes and cut out sugar. He will be delighted!

Well it won’t have all those good digestive enzymes and all the nutrition of raw milk and cream, but it’ll still be delicious! 🙂 Raw is always best, but there’s no need to be perfect all the time. Enjoy your ice cream!